Chicago, many years ago. I was an underemployed temp slogging each day to a giant advertising agency, wanting to escape crowded El trains, dreaming of an independent life in pristine wilderness. The best I could afford was a brief fishing trip to northern Minnesota, but those few days would change the direction of my life.
The resort owner had once known a man named Vernon Pick who’d operated an electrical repair shop during the Depression. More than anything, Pick, highly influenced by Thoreau, wanted to escape society and live off the land. For years, he worked weekends to build his own hydroelectric dam across a creek in the forest. When he finally moved to the woods, he’d barter his labor for goods and food he couldn’t make or hunt.
Vernon Pick achieved what I wanted most—he’d moved to the wilderness and freed himself from the cash economy. But then, in the spring of 1951, a tragic fire blazed through his property. Flames sixty-feet tall devoured his building, and with it, his hard-won freedom. At midlife, with everything he’d worked for carried away in billowing smoke, he faced a return to working for wages.
He and his wife Ruth drove west, heading for California, where he thought he’d find a job in a factory. When they reached Colorado, they saw fliers advertising the prices paid for uranium. The atomic arms race was accelerating, and uranium was a key ingredient in the weapons. Pick decided to try his luck among throngs of prospectors.
“Vernon Pick’s $10 Million Ordeal,” read a profile in Life magazine a couple of years later. It told the story of how he’d overcome the devastation of the Minnesota fire to find and stake one of the most valuable uranium mines in America. Suddenly, Pick, the new atomic poster boy of the American Dream, was receiving 10,000 fan letters a day, was cited in sermons by Norman Vincent Peale, and was name-checked in “Uranium Fever,” a song by country star Elton Britt. Pick was even invited to the White House. With his great wealth he built Walden West in California and Walden North in British Columbia.
This was the tale I discovered in the summer of 2001. I was hooked by the contrast between Pick’s long-held desire to drop out of society, and his sudden wealth and hobnobbing with celebrities and politicians.
A few years later, while prospecting for fossilized dinosaur bones in the San Rafael Swell with The Field Museum, I began recognizing landmarks and place names as having been locations visited by Vernon Pick during his search for uranium. I became determined to learn more about Pick and moved to Minneapolis, where his nephew told me that in a warehouse a couple of miles from where we were sitting, he’d stored his uncle’s journals, documents, and photographs.
With his blessing and encouragement, across the next five years I made over sixty visits to the warehouse, which launched me into the strangest aspects of the Cold War. Spies, dictators, preachers, terrorists, thieves, and even that non-existent hominid, Bigfoot, became part of Pick’s mysterious milieu. By succeeding in the “uranium game,” Pick did not find the freedom he always wanted. Instead, he found himself used as a propaganda pawn by government forces who were trying to defeat the Soviets without blowing up the world. And I, by assuming everything I’d initially learned was true in my own search for a modern-day “Walden Pond,” had become the last victim of one of the most intriguing con men of the twentieth century.
Book
I’ve written a narrative nonfiction manuscript telling the story of my search for Vernon Pick and am looking for a reputable publisher to help me connect with readers. If you’re an editor whose curiosity is piqued, please contact me.
Podcast
I’m looking to partner with experienced producers to shape my material about Pick into a serial podcast that tells the Uranium King’s tale alongside that of my quest. I have over fifteen recorded interviews, most of which pertain to Vernon’s time in Utah and British Columbia. Among them is an unpublished two-hour interview from about 1960 between Pick himself and an unknown journalist. Contact me if you work for a media company and are interested in helping me tell this story.
TV Series
A collaborator and I have written the first season of a fictional television series inspired by the life and times of Vernon Pick, and are looking to partner with experienced producers. We have registered our concept and scripts with WGA. Contact me if you’d like to help us bring our show to viewers.
Qualifications
My writing on Vernon Pick has earned a McKnight Artist Fellowship, an “artist initiative grant” from the Minnesota State Arts Board, and research grants from the Hoover and Eisenhower presidential foundations.
I have material from many archives, including presidential libraries, the Universities of Utah and Minnesota, and historical societies in several states. I’ve filed countless Freedom of Information Act requests and have received thousands of pages. I’ve visited Pick’s former properties in Minnesota (“Two Rivers”), California (“Walden West”), British Columbia (“Walden North”), and Utah (the “Delta / Hidden Splendor” mine) and interviewed people in these and several other locations.
